


Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Texas anymore

by fluffybookfaerie



Category: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Genre: College, Fluff, M/M, Snow, This is honestly the most self-indulgent fluff I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 14:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffybookfaerie/pseuds/fluffybookfaerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dante’s stipulations for a college were that it had to have a Division One swim team, it had to have a strong art department, and it couldn’t be in Texas. Ari’s one stipulation was that he couldn’t be more than a two hour drive away from Dante.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Texas anymore

"Dante." Ari placed his cold hand on Dante's shoulder and shook him gently, hoping the sound of his voice and the shock of the temperature would be enough to wake him, but Dante just breathed a thick sleep sigh and didn't move.

"Dante," he said, raising his voice as loudly as he dared, knowing how thin the walls of the dorm were. It was rare that his sneezes were not followed by an annoyingly friendly “Bless you!” from a neighboring room.

He kicked the wobbly wooden leg of their bed, to no avail. When Dante put his mind to something, there was no stopping him. Especially if that something was sleep. Technically, it was Dante's bed--or at least, it was the bed that was on the side of the room that Dante had claimed when they arrived--but they'd pushed the two twin beds together as soon as their parents had left to return to El Paso.

"They probably would've helped if we'd asked," Dante had noted. Secretly, Ari agreed, but there were certain boundaries that just needed to be kept in place.

Dante had two different alarm clocks that went off on days when he had morning classes, and Ari considered setting one of them off now, but of all days it was especially important today that nobody but the two of them was awake.

He slid his hand along the wall, around the Abbey Lane poster that had been a gift from one of Dante’s friends (Karen or Kristen or something), until he found the light switch, which he flipped. Dante groaned as the fluorescent light flickered on. Ari took this as a good sign, and jumped back into their bed. "Dante," he said a third time, shaking him in a way that could no longer be described as gentle. "Get up."

Dante breathed in a long breath that ended in a groan, and scowled with his eyes still shut. "No."

"Trust me," said Ari. "Get up, or you'll regret it."

Dante uncurled his legs into a stretch and buried his face into his pillow, so that his words were almost inaudible. "Why? Are you going to punch me?"

"Yeah. Maybe I'll leave a bruise. Just like that other time I punched you." He kissed Dante right on top of the purple ellipse on his neck that was finally, finally starting to fade. (Half of him wished Dante would wear one of the three scarves Soledad had bought for him before they left. The other half had to admit that he was a little bit proud when other students’ eyes lingered on the hickey before they remembered that staring was rude.)

Dante’s face emerged from his pillow just enough that Ari could see that he was smiling, and Ari kissed him there again so that the smile became a sleepy, lumpy laugh. Dante’s eyes eased open, and he reached for Ari so he could pull him into a proper kiss.

Ari allowed this, and then rolled out of the bed so he could find one of Dante’s shirts that lay crumpled on the floor and toss it at him. “Put this on.”

“No. Kiss me again.”

Ari obeyed, of course, but then he repeated, “Put your fucking shirt on.”

As Dante struggled to put his still-half-asleep head and arms in the right holes, Ari pawed through the piles of stuff on the floor, searching for a pair of shoes that belonged to Dante.

Dante’s stipulations for a college were that it had to have a Division One swim team, it had to have a strong art department, and it couldn’t be in Texas. Ari’s one stipulation was that he couldn’t be more than a two hour drive away from Dante.

He’d gone along on the tour to please Dante and his mother, but he was glad he’d gone. The wide, green fields they’d seen that dotted the rural campus were perfect for stargazing, and it turned out that the school published a well-known literary journal--one that he’d discovered was only too happy to employ freshmen to do the boring things like sending out rejection letters.

Dante had taken one look at two students walking barefoot along a brick path, and the decision had been made.

“I can’t get in here,” Ari had protested. “You’ll get a scholarship, but it’s too good a school for me.”

Dante, Soledad, and Ari’s dad had exchanged exasperated looks.

“You’ll get in,” Dante had told him.

“You’ll get in,” Ari’s mom had agreed.

As it turned out, all that studying he did when Dante would rather they were swimming or making out in the desert had paid off.

Dante had kicked off his shoes the moment they arrived in the dorm room, and Ari was pretty sure his feet had been bare ever since.

Under Dante’s backpack that was laden with pins--his rainbow GLF pin (Ari had one as well, somewhere), the pin that displayed the quote from The Grapes of Wrath, ‘Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed,’ and his Latino Student Union pin (Ari did not have one of those. He didn’t see the point in going to those meetings, though he understood why Dante needed to go)--Ari found a single battered tennis shoe. He paired it with one of his own, which would be just a little too small for Dante but it was better than nothing, and dumped them at the foot of the bed, almost spilling the murky grey water from a bong one of Dante’s friends (Marvin or Melvin or something) had left behind a day or two earlier.

“What am I putting on shoes for?” Dante demanded, yawning.

“You’ll find out. Put them on.” Ari stared, unyielding, into Dante’s curious eyes.

“Tell me first.”

Ari shook his head with a small smile. Dante threaded a finger through one of Ari’s belt loops, drawing him in as if to kiss him, but instead, once Ari’s shoulders were in range, he tickled him with a wicked grin.

“DAMN IT,” Ari gasped out between peals of laughter, cursing Dante and the day he’d let slip that he was powerless when it came to tickles. He tried to get away, but Dante held firm to his belt loop, their laughs mingling.

Ari finally managed to unhook Dante’s hand from his jeans, and he ran a safe distance away from the bed, shielding himself with a pillow for good measure. 

“Your feet are going to fucking freeze outside. That’s all I’m telling you.”

“I’ll put them on,” Dante relented. “But I reserve the right to take them off later.”

Dante asked again where they were going, perpetually curious, as Ari took his hand and led him out into the quiet, dark hallway, but Ari said nothing, letting their footsteps echo unchallenged up to the red glow of the exit sign at the back of their dorm.

He pushed open the doors beneath the sign, and Dante breathed, “Oh.”

They’d seen snow before. Technically, it could be said that it snowed in El Paso. Ari remembered Dante glaring at the feeble, short-lived flakes that the sky’s grey clouds had produced, the winter after he’d returned from Chicago. “It’s like if I tried to go back to kissing Emma after kissing you,” Ari remembered him saying. He thought he understood, now.

Everything was quiet, muffled beneath a powdered sugar blanket. In the imperfect dark of early morning, beneath the untouched snow, it was impossible to tell where the grass met the road; everything was one smooth, white canvas.

“It feels like the sky left a gift just for the two of us,” said Dante, and Ari took Dante’s face in both hands and kissed him, because that was exactly what he’d wanted Dante to see.

Slowly, never breaking eye contact with Ari, Dante pulled the mismatched shoes off his feet. With a sigh, Ari followed suit. Together, they plunged their bare feet into the snow.

“Shit,” hissed Ari, the word escaping from his mouth in a white line of vapor, like steam from a boiling kettle.

“Shit.” Dante agreed. He took an experimental step and sucked in a breath as his foot hit the snow again. “That’s fucking cold.”

“N-nice observation,” Ari said. His teeth had begun to chatter. “You should b-be a weatherman.”

They laughed. Dante dug his hands into the snow, and when he straightened, he was holding a snowball.

Ari moved to grab it from Dante before he could throw it, but Dante was faster, and the snowball caught Ari’s shoulder, exploding in a shower of cold. Ari had never been hit by a snowball before. He decided that he liked it.

They chased each other around in the snow, and when it seemed that their feet might turn blue they put their shoes on and chased each other around some more, until they collapsed, laughing and shivering, on top of each other.

“I’m glad you woke me up,” Dante said into Ari’s shoulder. 

“I know.”

Dante pulled himself up so their faces were level, with a devilish expression on his face, and then he paused, as if he had changed his mind. He stood up.

“Stay right there,” said Dante. “Don’t even twitch.” He ran back into the dorm.

Ari held still, even though the gap between his shoes and his jeans was lying exposed in the snow, and cold water was dripping down behind the collar of his shirt.

Dante soon reemerged with his sketchpad and a pencil. He sat down on the front step, and began sketching.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, as his pencil slashed across the paper in broad arcs.

“How cold I am.” Dante laughed. “And about how much I really like snow,” Ari continued. “And how I’m glad we chose to go to this school. And how much this feels like being home.”

“I miss it,” said Dante. “I’m glad we went somewhere different, but I miss my parents. And your parents.”

“I miss Legs.”

“I miss her most. You think your parents could ship her over on a plane?”

“Her and some really good menudo.”

“Yeah, nobody knows how to make Mexican food around here.”

Silence fell, broken only by the scratch of Dante’s pencil, until that, too, stopped.

“Can I get up now?” asked Ari. “I’m freezing.” He looked over at Dante, and Dante looked back. They smiled, for no reason except that they were two people who liked to look at each other.

“You look really good right there,” Dante smirked.

“Just because of the snow.”

“You make the snow look more inviting.”

“You make that step look more inviting.” And, because Dante was clearly done sketching, and because he really was cold, Ari stood and shook the snow out of his wet clothes. He sat beside Dante on the step and looked at the sketch in his lap. It satisfied Ari to know that if any of Dante’s friends had tried that, he would have snapped the book shut.

Dante had drawn him lying wet and tousled, not in the snow, but in their desert, surrounded by dirt and grass and footprints that could have belonged to a coyote, but Ari knew they belonged to Legs. The grey and white Ari looked out at the viewer--at himself--with a careless amusement, and even the flesh-and-blood Ari had to admit, he looked pretty good.

“Do you like it?” Dante asked, but he was smiling. He knew he was talented.

“Yeah, I like it.” Ari scanned the sketch again. “But why aren’t you in it?” Maybe it had been a dumb question, since of course Dante hadn’t been lying with him, he’d been drawing. But if the point was to bring him home, Dante should be there, too.

“I’m right there,” said Dante. He pointed at Ari’s feet in the sketch. He hadn’t realized before, but one of the shoes was a little bit bigger than the other. He looked down at Dante’s feet. In real life, Dante wore his own shoe on his right foot, and Ari’s shoe on his left. In the drawing, Ari wore Dante’s shoe on his left foot, and his own shoe on his right. 

“Good,” said Ari.

“Good,” agreed Dante, smiling into Ari’s shoulder. “You still cold?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go inside. I’ll warm you up.”

“That’s cheesy.”

“It’s going to work, though, isn’t it?”

“Probably.” Ari laced their fingers together. 

He looked out over the snow-covered landscape. The sun was just beginning to rise, and visible beneath it, written in footprints, was the story of the two boys who had run and rolled around that morning.

“I’ve never seen snow that lasted this long before,” said Ari. “It looks different when it’s not new.”

“Yeah,” said Dante. “It looks better.”


End file.
